Hacker's - People who do great things with computers
Valhalla - In Norse myth, an afterlife of never ending battle.
Hacker's Valhalla - A Java Blog for info in the never ending battle of releases.
A focus on Spring, Testing and WebLogic Server.

The test info is also on their site, look for "Software" in the list. As the recent spat on Yahoo's CEO demonstrated, there isn't currently an equivalent of the engineering certifications in software. This may change that.

This may prove to be pivotal for the field of Software Engineering / Programming / Whatever we call it.

An Aspect is just a bit of code (with Spring it can even be a POJO) that is configured (typically with an annotation or XML) to run before, after, or around a join point (for now, assume it's a fancy word for method).

For the canonical example of logging, you can create an aspect to log something like "Calling method x with parameters x, y and z" before a method runs and "Returning from method x with return value y" afterwards.

This separates the logged class from the logging system entirely and results in a second class logging the first one.

If you want logging statements in the middle of a method, too bad, refactor to call a helper method (thus creating a new join point) and log there.

Hopefully presenting the gist of it with concrete examples will help everyone's understanding.